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Peatland fires are among the most stubborn natural disasters on earth. Extinguish the surface flames and the crisis can continue burning silently underground for weeks, releasing smoke and carbon long after the visible fire appears to be gone. That is precisely the challenge Indonesia now faces in West Kalimantan, where a combination of prolonged drought and extreme heat has pushed the province’s fire season into territory that has already exceeded the full-year damage recorded in 2024.
The National Disaster Management Agency, known by its Indonesian acronym BNPB, confirmed on Saturday that 28,680 hectares of land had burned across West Kalimantan between January and June this year. That figure surpasses the 26,703 hectares recorded across the entirety of 2024, and the fire season is far from over.
Underground Embers and the Limits of Conventional Firefighting
BNPB chief Suharyanto, who conducted an aerial inspection of firefighting operations in Kubu Raya on Friday, was direct about why peatland fires resist standard suppression tactics. Embers can persist beneath the surface even after flames above ground have been fully extinguished, meaning ground teams and water-bombing helicopters can control what is visible without actually ending the fire. The peat itself, which is dense compressed organic matter that can extend several metres underground, continues to combust and produce smoke.
Suharyanto said in a BNPB statement that rainfall remains the most effective solution, because water penetrating the soil can reach the subsurface combustion that aerial and ground operations cannot. The problem is that West Kalimantan has gone more than a month without meaningful rain, and forecasts from the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency indicate hotter conditions and a high fire risk will persist across the province for at least another three weeks.
In the absence of natural rainfall, Indonesia is turning to cloud seeding. “The most effective and efficient solution is rain, so when there is potential for rain clouds, we will carry out weather-modification operations,” Suharyanto said. A weather-modification aircraft has been placed on standby alongside the firefighting fleet, ready to seed any cloud formations that develop over the region. The challenge is that cloud seeding requires suitable clouds to work with, and those have been scarce.
A Rapid Escalation of Resources That Signals Genuine Alarm
The speed at which Indonesia has scaled up its aerial response reflects how seriously authorities are treating this outbreak. As of Thursday, West Kalimantan had three water-bombing helicopters actively deployed. BNPB announced that two additional helicopters were scheduled for deployment within the following two days, bringing the planned operational fleet to five, with a separate patrol helicopter also on standby. Deploying five dedicated water-bombing aircraft to a single province is a significant commitment of national disaster resources.
Ground teams are working alongside the aerial operation, though their effectiveness against subsurface peat combustion is inherently limited. The combination of surface suppression, aerial water bombing, and weather modification represents Indonesia’s full toolkit for this type of emergency, and all three are being used simultaneously.
Separately, BNPB reported that four smaller forest and land fires recorded between Friday morning and 7am Saturday in North Sumatra, Central Java, South Sulawesi, and West Java had been extinguished. Those fires affected a combined 4.5 hectares, a relatively minor figure that underscores how concentrated and severe the West Kalimantan situation is by comparison.
Why This Matters Beyond Indonesia’s Borders
For Malaysia and Singapore, Indonesian peatland fires are not a distant concern. The transboundary haze events that have periodically blanketed both countries, triggering school closures, flight disruptions, and public health advisories, trace directly to large-scale peat combustion in Sumatra and Kalimantan. West Kalimantan shares a land border with the Malaysian state of Sarawak, and smoke from fires in Kubu Raya can travel hundreds of kilometres depending on wind patterns.
The 2015 peat fire season remains the benchmark for regional catastrophe, when fires across Indonesia produced haze that affected hundreds of millions of people across Southeast Asia and caused estimated economic losses of over USD 16 billion. While the current situation has not reached that scale, the trajectory is concerning. Burning more land in six months than was burned in all of 2024, during a period when the dry season has not yet peaked, points toward a potentially severe second half of the year.
Indonesia has made institutional progress since 2015, including the establishment of the Peatland Restoration Agency and stricter enforcement against land-clearing fires. But the underlying vulnerability, vast areas of drained and degraded peatland in a region experiencing increasingly erratic rainfall, has not been resolved. As long as that structural condition persists, any prolonged dry spell carries the risk of exactly the kind of escalation now unfolding in West Kalimantan. The question for the region is not whether peatland fire seasons will recur, but whether Indonesia’s response capacity and its neighbours’ preparedness can keep pace with a climate that is making the dry spells longer and the fires harder to stop.
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